Contrary to the apparent beliefs of some metalheads and post-bop tenor sax soloists, collaboration is much more important to good musicmaking than competition. For every completely solo performance you come across, there must be at least half a dozen that involved more than one musician. If you extend that to the musical contributions of coaches, live sound engineers, record producers, musical directors, etc., then hardly anything is not collaborative. Even what is apparently one person merely requiring others to act as their musical slaves or extensions of their performing ability still involves (a) those others being persuaded to get involved and (b) successful communication of the main performer’s musical intentions (at every level from what key? to should this chord get quieter or louder over those two bars?) to the others.

We’ve got quite hung up on teamwork and collaborative ability as a society in the last couple of decades, perhaps as a reaction against Thatcher-Reagan extreme individualism when corporates at least started to realise that people who individually stood out might be incapable of forming a functioning department that did tasks too large to be simply handed over to individuals. Various ways of assessing and improving collaborative ability are de rigueur for certain kinds of corporate jobs – think group tasks at interview, team-building exercises, etc.

Music, bizarrely given its nature, doesn’t seem to have got it yet. I have yet to hear of a conservatoire course or professional ensemble that tested applicants’ ensemble ability beyond the token level of working with piano accompaniment. No requirement to play a string quartet movement with other applicants, or current members; no auditions in chamber group configurations; no rejections on the grounds of inability to hold a soprano line while standing next to an alto in a piece of Tallis polyphony. And it’s sadly often even worse trying to get gigs, band membership, festival slots or funding opportunities outside classical music, where everything can seem to be done on a mix of ability to schmooze the organisers, popularity on Facebook and having better self-promotion material than other candidates. And yet, there is nothing more destructive to the prospect of a good gig night all round than ending up with three or four bands that sound nothing like other, attract completely different demographics of fans and whose audiences hate the music of the other acts on the bill. That gives you low turnout, people trying to arrive just before and leave just after ‘their’ band’s set, no one making any money and none of the performers picking up any new followers either.

I see why organisers have to pick from the herd given almost every musical leg-up from places at the RCM to slots are your local pub with a PA is massively oversubscribed with applicants. Music is too popular, perhaps sadly, to let everyone who wants a platform have one – there’d be no space for anything else and no audiences because they’d all be playing elsewhere. But if music as a sector focused significantly more on ability to work with others and less on ability to knock them down, we might just get better musicians and better music out of it.